Tracking and filing sales tax

Sales tax is not revenue. It is somebody else's money, collected at the point of sale and held until you pay it over. A business that treats it as income is spending a jurisdiction's money and finds out at filing time.

This screen keeps it apart from both revenue and expenses so you can see what you are holding.

Find it at Accounting → Sales Tax.

Where the numbers come from

The tax comes from the invoices your field service system issued. HousecallPro, ServiceTitan and Jobber all record a tax amount per invoice, and Omnyra reads it from there rather than storing a copy. That means the figure can never drift from the invoices behind it.

Only invoices that were actually issued count. A draft has been sent to nobody, so no tax was collected on it.

Still held is the number that matters

Collected is history and paid over is bookkeeping. The figure to act on is what is still held, which is how much of the money in your bank account is not yours.

Recording a payment

When you file a return, record the payment: who you paid, the period the return covers, the amount, and the date. What is still held comes down by it.

The period is the one the return covers, not the day you paid. A March return filed on 20 April belongs to March. Recording it under April would leave March looking unpaid and April looking overpaid, every quarter forever.

When your invoices and your accounting system disagree

If your accounting system also carries a sales tax liability, both figures are shown, and Omnyra tells you the gap between them rather than picking one.

That is deliberate. Usually a gap means tax was charged on jobs and never posted to a tax account in the accounting system, which is worth knowing about. Merging the two numbers into one would hide the only interesting thing on the screen.

Reading the effective rate

Each filing period shows the rate the tax works out to against the sales behind it. A jurisdiction has one rate, so if a month computes to roughly twice what you charge, the invoices behind it are being counted twice, and the figure should not be filed against.

Rebate and program billing

Some jobs are billed twice on purpose: once to a rebate program and once to the customer, with both invoices carrying the full job for compliance. Omnyra counts a job like that once and tells you how many duplicates it set aside, so the total is checkable rather than something to take on trust.

What this does not do yet

It reports and records. It does not calculate tax on a new sale, because invoices are still raised in your field service system rather than here. When native invoicing arrives, the rates come with it.

Last reviewed 2026-09-07

Tracking and filing sales tax — Omnyra Wiki | Omnyra